Today brought two must-read articles showing why the people-power struggle succeeded in Egypt:
A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History from the New York Times provides very interesting background on the organizers of the Egyptian people-power revolution and what happened from day to day. It discusses how the organizers learned from previous successful nonviolent efforts, especially by Otpor in Yugoslavia and the recent effort in Tunisia.
...Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley...
For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability...
The (Sometimes) Incredible Power of Nonviolent Protest by Michael Schwarz published at the Huffington Post offers information about why this revolution was successful compared to other unsuccessful efforts, such as the Chinese Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.
He emphasizes how much economic power the movement was able to exert against the military elite and domestic and foreign corporations, particularly compromising the crucial tourist industry. He sees this economic power as critical to pushing military and corporate leaders to distance themselves from President Mubarek.
...From their inception, the huge protests threatened the billions of dollars that the leaders and chief beneficiaries of the Mubarak regime had acquired during their 30-year reign of terror, corruption, and accumulation. To the generals in particular, it was surely apparent that the massive acts of brutality necessary to suppress the uprising would have caused perhaps irreparable harm, threatening its vast economic interests. In other words, either trying to outwait the revolutionaries or imposing the Tiananmen solution risked the downfall of the economic empires of Egypt’s ruling groups...
Put simply, from the beginning, the Egyptian uprising had the effect of a general strike. Starting on January 25th, the first day of the protest, tourism -- the largest industry in the country, which had just begun its high season -- went into free fall. After two weeks, the industry had simply “ground to a halt,” leaving a significant portion of the two million workers it supported with reduced wages or none at all, and the few remaining tourists rattling around empty hotels, catching the pyramids, if at all, on television...
Both of these articles are worth reading in full.
For reference, here are two manuals by a the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies -- CANVAS (former Otpor leaders) about how to conduct a nonviolent revolution against a repressive military regime:
CANVAS, Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points (long pdf)
CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle, Student Book (long pdf)
Similar information is available from Gene Sharp's Albert Einstein Institute
By the way, I know that the people-power revolution in Egypt was not completely nonviolent: people fought back violently against the police and the pro-Mubarek thugs, throwing rocks and burning vehicles and buildings. But compared to armed insurrection, in which typically a small group of people deliberately take up arms and attempt to violently attack and destroy the police/military, I believe this revolution falls more in the category of nonviolent struggle. It was civilian-based, it broadly encompassed a large percent of the population, it relied primarily on refusing to consent with authority -- using nonviolent tactics such as rallies, strikes, and occupations -- rather than destroying the opposition, and its stated goal was the creation of a democratic government responsive to ordinary people and respecting of human, civil, and economic rights (rather than assumption of governmental power by a small, violent insurrectionary group). To me, these are the critical aspects of a strategic nonviolent struggle.